Categories

Coding, Web design.

portfolio

Last year, on the 3rd of April, I lay in excite as I bragged about a design update to whatever audience I had for my portfolio that went from 💩 to something that I would call an achievement that day.

I went on about how content I was with it for the time being until about a week later the excite was replaced with a pit of angst within myself as I pondered on why everything looked so wrong.

Self-learning design has always been about observing it. Letting it sink in then having the option to replicate it. You have the tools. You know how to use them. But in the end, your mind is a blank slate.

And with that said, let’s get into a self-analysis of how I’ve taken it a step further over the year. Below you’ll witness a murder and the subjugator.

Le Subjugator

Le dieded

Now that you know, let us carry on with what was truly wrong with the former design. First of all.

I don’t know what came into mind when I designed this but as far as I can recall, it looked good on paper. What I simply wanted to implement was a Call To Action button that would scroll the viewer down to my projects section.

The button looks like a drop down and that pop out make no sense.

It was late 2016 when I caught up with simple, yet effective SVGs (in detail here). My conclusion was that abrupt ends towards the end of sections, were simply too terrible, especially the way I was executing it. SVGs came along and filled in that gap.

With a much better looking CTA (but still not the best), I managed to compliment a ‘layered’ effect of different shades. Playing around with geometry transitions has always been a favorite.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the files of my former design but those triangles slid in with a 45 degree rotation. The black and cyan-ish triangles you see there are simply squares that are hidden and partially shown on hover through that 45deg tilt. The black box tilted to the right where as the bottom, cyan box tilted upwards. This gave it this sleek look.

The job of the CTA was to scroll the user down 100 pixels to the designated section…

It was not until later, I realized that this was terrible and put some distance between it by bring the ‘about’ section before the portfolio. Talk about proper hierarchy.

The cringe

What you see below that paragraph of cringe is a bunch of icons of the ‘skillsets’ I have. Before this, I had bars that represented this, similar to my 2015 design:

But the thing is, there’s no limits to these skills. Something new comes out every day and I was simply pulling out the experience percentage based on my then beliefs.

Instead, I’ve replaced it with something generic and descriptive. This goes below the about section.

The simple “Biography”

Speaking of the about section, here’s how it looked before.

Talk about a cringeful, long description with font size big enough for sufficient for the elders only.

I’ve changed this entirely. It’s now the first section, so it’s right below the header.

Pretty dank, aye?

Navigation, ahoy

Before we progress, there is one more thing we need to talk about and that’s the sticky navigation bar that follows you down.

Before I had this dull piece of stick

And now, there’s this

The portfolio’s new design is supposed to have more contrast. As you may have noticed (or not), the height of the sticky nav bar is much smaller now. It adds more breathing space to the page by tens of pixels.

There’s also a little border at the bottom to make it ‘pop-out’ with a much more elaborate shadow at the bottom than the former.

The Portfolio

Let’s talk about the portfolio section. Before it was boring cards with direct links to the download or view button and the cards themselves had some design issues. I don’t have a pre-existing screenshot but they looked like the ones now except the images got squeezed or stretched.

I’ve updated that part and divided the portfolio into 3 categories, Client, Designs & Apps.

Taking guess would be enough to realize that the client category is for client work, the design category is for web designs I make myself, be it free or premium. And Apps are app websites I’ve developed.

But that’s not the best part of the portfolio, you may see a familiar design on hover here lacking the download and view buttons. That’s because it’s begging to be clicked.If it’s downloadable, a small download button appears as well. Now once you click on the card, it fetches the details for the item via AJAX and using Bootstrap Modals, we get this beauty.

I can safely say that this is probably the first modal I’ve designed, hence some design issues here too. I need to rework the bottom part, not sure at the moment how though. But this is what I’ve got. It’s quick and simple. Bootstrap Modals are a bonus with User Experience. Click on the X or behind the modal and you’re back to the portfolio.

The Bottom

The contact section may look nearly identical to the former but rest assured it’s been revamped from a user experience perspective. Instead of the good old page reload for the submission process, it now utilizes the power of AJAX for a synchronous update on the spot. It’s acquainted with Sweet Alerts and Google’s reCAPTCHA which provides some mercy on the database.

There’s 860 messages of which 4 are actual messages and the rest of it are spam. My website is quite popular with the bots – heh.

Messages from Bots

Nevertheless, here’s how fast and simple it is now for anyone to drop in a message.

As for the footer, I’ve removed the bulky useless section it had before and replaced it with something simple.

You may have realized, I removed the Twitter Feed! Actually, I had plans for it. Right now I’m using free hosting from 000webhost. It disallows the use of REST APIs and that sucks. I actually have the whole Twitter API, cache, etc ready to roll out. All it’s lacking is the design. I thought I’d put it in the footer but that’s just meh. I thought I should promote my blog posts on my portfolio as well so I’ve been thinking of making an entire new section dedicated to a twitter feed (“recent rambling”) and blog posts (“recent posts”). I haven’t designed anything yet as they both use REST APIs and until I move to a proper limitless domain, I won’t be updating on this.

Enough of the design, Let’s talk about the inside.

It’s what’s on the inside that counts.

I’ve re-coded everything in PHP, still not following the MVC structure but rather my own structure, which is truly odd to explain.

I’ve moved from using CSS to LESS. LESS is basically better CSS syntax. Next up, I’ve started using Bootstrap as the front end framework. As much as I promised to use only made-from-scratch stuff, I’ve really been slowing myself down. Bootstrap has built in modals, grids, etc which really put off workload. Both of these combined proved a faster and easier workflow. I’ve really cut in half the time it takes to code a design.

What now?

I’m still not content with how it looks. I’ve still yet to implement the section that consists of my blog and twitter posts. Also, the website lacks responsiveness (not adapted for mobile or tablets). I’m too lazy to add it now but I’ll probably ninja add it later on.

One more thing!

Branding. So far I’ve not used any logos to represent myself and really needed a favicon (that tiny icon you see on your tab before the web page’s title). So I followed my life motto, “Why not?”, and thus utilized my expert GIMP skills (2poor4photoshop) and came up with the following.

As you can see, it looks terrible at the edges, but that’s not going to show in a small logo or favicon and I’m too lazy to perfect the small details it at the moment. Maybe later on?

This concludes the berating of my former portfolio and what I did to upgrade it.

So, I’ve redesigned the portfolio. Sort of. Even re-coded the backhand so it’s OOP that makes actual sense. That’s the gist of it.

SVG

It’s been used around a lot since the past year and I thought “why not?”. I made some really simple SVGs that are right-angled triangles to give the edges of containers a padded and – er – better look? THEY LOOK GREAT, and that’s what I believe matters? Okay. In addition, these are vector graphics and are ludicrously small in size. Going to use them more in further projects after I get a good grip on them.

BOOTSTRAP

The only reason I’ve started using bootstrap is because of its preset configuration, glyphs and the responsive grids. Oh, the responsive grids – never have I ever made something without spending much time on the frames.

I pat my self for making it look better but I still believe it’s got it’s ways to go before it reaches perfection. The thought of upgrading the current design rather than making a complete new one was really proper choice.

WHAT’S NEXT?

I’m planning a twitter feed and a cool little vertical ‘timeline’ under my bio which would show which programming language/feat I achieved at which year.

I also think that the SVG triangles are a little to large? Not sure, but I’m going to play around with that.

So, I’m back with another blog. I do realise that the previous one (bootyphpandi.wordpress.com) was lacking a decent name and so I took it upon myself (again) to bring it to a professional state. I had plans of making my own CMS but again I realised that I’d have to hit up AngularJs and some more alpha type stuff to make it look like a decent CMS. Plus due to the lack of time, I’ll be using this as my official blog.

Shoutout to Tonal theme as I really love this minimalistic freebie.

Some Updates

Portfolio Polishing

I updated my own portfolio (irfandahir.com). The design was left unfinished so I polished it out a bit after recieving some insight and critique from forum boards. I still feel it’s lacking so I’m devising plans to make it look nicer.

Introducing Omilos

I’ve made another freebie, Omilos. I thought “Omilos” was greek for “something big” but my greek buddy corrected me once more. Nevertheless, the design is upto the level of being used. IMO it is lacking some design fundamentals and has some flaws but it will get your job done as it’s coded as cleanly possible. If you hire a designer or have some coding skills, you’ll be able to adjust it to your needs.

Project.Extract 4

If you’re a CS2D player then you might know what this is, if not then here’s a breif explaination. Project.Extract (including legacy versions 1, 2 & 3) have been downloadable apps which run through your browser with the dependacy of Apache & PHP (WAMP, LAMP). CS2D generates a fair amount of logs files and so I created a PHP Library which would extract useful amounts of information from these logs. And Project.Extract is the visual version of that. The Legacy versions 1-3 only extracted user information and had text based searching.

So a year later, after leveling up multiple times in PHP I realised I could extract so much more. I’ve developed a PHP Library, Log Miner, for it which acts as a core for Project.Extract 4. Both the PHP Library and PE4 are in works. The difference between legacy versions and this is that this has the capability to extract ALOT more from your logs. Every single detail. And the awesome part? It’s both a web based app if you don’t know how to set it up and downloadable which removes limits. I’ll talk more about it once I’m ready to deploy it.

Recently redesigned the portfolio leaving behind the design blueprint I’ve had been following with 27% of the page following you down as a nav. It’s more of a flat design now with “flat colors” in the palette.

The design is something of flat and of using google’s material “card” design for the portfolio elements.

It’s got added responsiveness, although there’s some minor issues here and there which I should be fixing when I can. Oh, and I’ll be adding a resume page (will need to research the proper design for it) and a personal blog. Yes, I do have this one however I’m looking forward to a more brief, professional and public one.

So by the time this post is posted, the new design should be up live unless I’ve delayed it yet another week (delayed it previous week for polishing + responsivity). And when it does my first public html/css design, “Portfolio”, should be available.

As for the backhand I’ve got some self-made retarded “MVC” PHP OOP running, which I should be replacing in the future with a proper MVC (Model View Controller) backhand.

I’ve had this project almost completed sitting in my hard drive since the past few months. All I had left was the mobile responsivity to do so I decided to wrap this up and we are with a hastily done cover photo to show you what it’s made of. Please spare me regrading how bad it is. I suck at GIMP/Photoshop stuff. Couldn’t do more than grab a few mockups, print screen and crop&resize the pictures in. Damn, that’s shameful. I’ll be using these types of shameful mockups in the future as well, please bare it until I level up or something.

I’ve been re-working my website since the past week. Re-did the front & back end. Got really creative. No. Not with the design, with the code. Makes me question myself at times but Object orientated programming can turn into a muck if you get too creative. The design is almost the same thing except with a css based grid & better responsivity. While re-doing the – wait this post isn’t about my website.

Ehm – I made a design which was downloadable with my lacking skills called last year. It was called “Portfolio”. It was honestly shit. But that shit has now turned into something beautiful. Because this is Portfolio *Remastered*. In the eyes of the professionals this might be shit too but according to my eyes in this plain of the 5th dimensional layer, this looks great for public release.

And so, while I flick a tear off, I announce my very first “professional” public HTML5 template which can be used by anyone & anywhere. The only copyrights its got other than mines are the awesome stock photos, an awesome font & the fontawesome (that’s actually the name of the icon set, so no punwun intended).

Portfolio is a possible design for the photographers, artists, designers (and so on) out there. It has three different types of “boxes” in the ‘Recent Works’ container. I pulled out a few sketches on this one and this seemed by far the best design. They’re usually called “Cards”. It’s a known concept design that I’d love to integrate.

Anyways, I might release another design one day which would be of the same concept but with a more minimalistic design (the ideas spurring are endless!).

Release? Very very soon! It’ll be the first design post once I finish the new projects container on my website.

I’ve finally got my own domain registered. It’s irfandahir.com. I’m still using freehost, just linked the name-servers. I wouldn’t need more for my own portfolio so a freehost works well.

I’ve done some updates. The website is now more interactive. Every single effect, apart from the fade-ins in the intro-panel at the top is done with pure CSS3, especially the new Project Viewer. CSS3 animation transitions are epic and I’m currently doing my work around with them.

For example, this is the header on hover. Those are two borders wrapped around the “r” and “f”. And the “” expand on hover as well. There are some alpha transitions as well. I did experiment around and this was the final result that looked appealing. It’s only available on the desktop mode however.

Here is the new projects viewer. The background of the boxes is the average color extracted from the image itself. On hover it displays the preview and download links(if there are any). The transition effect itself is pretty slick. I’ve been working with rotated boxes transformed boxes for it.
The old project viewer is still available as well. You can choose which one you’d wish to use from the little button on the top right of the project viewer. It was a bit of a hassle but I managed to get it done in pure CSS3. The new project viewer is default on desktops. However the old project viewer is the default and only one available on tablets. It’s a bit different for phones tho. The phone version has a horizontal slider for it. It’s a minimized version of the new project viewer.

I’ve minimalised the “about me” context a bit more. Although I’ve not shown most of the skillsets here but I’m planning to replace it with doughnut charts instead. It’d rather look more appealing. I’ll do that with CSS3 transform too.

The contact section has minor changes. I’ve changed the “You can only contact me once per day” text to the following with a link to my email if you press it so. The only reason for this is because since I’m getting host on a free account, the limit for daily directly emailing someone is around 15. And abusing it results in an account lockdown. Therefore I had to resort to putting up a database for it. After doing so I was met by bot advertisement spams so I decided to further lock it down. And I haven’t gotten a single bot message since then. So I’ve got that thing going for me. o.x

This is fairly pretty much it for now. I’m working on a few other client projects so I’ll update on those when I’m done with them.